Making the road by walking, one step at a time
by Marissa Papula, Director of Campus Ministry
A group text of Jesuit-affiliated friends had my phone buzzing recently. Someone in the chat had been offered a job opportunity far from home and wasn’t sure how to approach it. Schooled in Ignatian spirituality, he knew a bit about discernment but wanted to hear from other reflective, creative companions about how they would pray with such a decision, and what advice they might offer.
The chat showed up. Texts rolled in about praying with the initial emotional response to the news, asking whom such a move would “best serve,” recommending Ignatius’s deathbed meditation, proposing imaginative prayer to envision life in the new place and notice consolation or desolation, and advising against letting fear play any role in the choice. The messages were rich, wise, heartfelt, and soulful: a collection of mirrors reflecting truth back to this person as he weighed options among goods, all with an unmistakably Ignatian accent.
One message in particular, written by a Jesuit friend of mine, stopped me mid-scroll and has been preserved in my screenshots ever since, so perfectly did he grasp what everyone else was reaching toward:
“At some point, the answer to your question will only be as clear as it can get without a promise of certainty (which we so often long for). When you’re at that point, pray for courage instead, and trust that the discernment was good. Onward!”
At LMU, we walk alongside students who face these same kinds of good discernments all the time: this major or that one, this internship or another, a hometown after graduation or somewhere entirely new. Among our faculty and staff, too, we often make decisions without the clarity or certainty we crave, choices guided only by limited information and the raw emotional data that illuminate just the next step forward, rarely the whole path.
So often, I want to see the entire journey before me. But more often than not, I’m given only enough light for the next moment. And so, I pray for courage.
This Ignatian Heritage Month, themed “Us, Here, Now,” invites us at LMU to reflect on who we are, in this moment, in this place, through the lens of mission. Our mission is not a static inheritance but a dynamic responsibility: one that makes demands of us, one that calls us to the creative challenge of living faithfully to our identity while imagining who we are called to become. The magis animates this work, as does our call to live as persons for and with others. We choose magnanimity over myopia. And that choice, too, demands courage.
This November, the Division of Mission offers a buffet of programs for our community to feast on as we nourish ourselves to answer this shared call. Together, we situate ourselves, us, here, now, faithful to who we are, drawn toward who we might yet be. Our programming and encounters offer clarity about our identity and a renewed confidence in our commitments.
Join us. And then, pray for the courage to live into the vision of who we are called to become.